Hospitals charge huge 'trauma' fees to treat people with minor injuries
CNN
The care was ordinary. A hospital in Modesto, California, treated a 30-year-old man for shoulder and back pain after a car accident. He went home in less than three hours. The bill was extraordinary.
The bill was extraordinary. Sutter Health Memorial Medical Center charged $44,914 including an $8,928 "trauma alert" fee, billed for summoning the hospital's top surgical specialists and usually associated with the most severely injured patients. The case, buried in the records of a 2017 trial, is a rare example of a courtroom challenge to something billing consultants say is increasingly common at U.S. hospitals.
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